My name is Melissa H. and I compulsively buy salad dressing.

Today was not one of my best days and after sharing all the details with Matt and forcing him to analyze all of my thoughts and feelings he suggested I blog to make myself feel better. He thought that making a little fun of myself would cheer me right up. We'll see.

Matt said that I should share one of my darkest secrets: I cannot stop buying Balsamic Vinaigrette salad dressing. Yes, it is my salad dressing of choice but it goes so much deeper than that. I eat it all the time, with a wide variety of foods, not just salads. I use it as a marinade and a dipping sauce, I will not patronize restaurants that I know don't serve this delicious creation if at all possible. You might be thinking, this isn't so bad, you might even have foods you like a lot. But loving to eat it isn't really the problem. It is the purchasing of the Balsamic Vinaigrette that is the real problem.

At current count between my fridge and my pantry I have a total of nine bottles of this salad dressing. I can recognize that this is ridiculous. Matt, our resident armchair psychologist, calls it a compulsion. Here is how it happens, before I go to the grocery store, Matt's last words to me are usually, "Do not buy salad dressing." I say okay and leave knowing that I am going to have the will power to not buy it. But then something happens to me once I get there and I am in the vicinity of Balsamic Vinaigrette. I start to rationalize. I think, "You know, Matt and I both ate one side salad last week, that probably really depleted our stock, I should get some to be on the safe side." I know, it defies all logic. Or Matt's personal favorite, "What if we want to have a spur of the moment cucumber and tomato salad and we have no dressing?" Despite the fact that we are in possession of neither cucumbers or tomatoes, this is a real crisis in my mind. I can sometimes talk myself out of the purchase, but it is always against my better judgement. It is like I am stocking up for a Y2K scenario and we will need cases of this salad dressing to survive. Matt likes to tease me and say that in house fires people sometimes worry about saving family photos or priceless momentos. He says I would run back into our burning house to save all my Balsamic Vinaigrettes.

It is a big joke at our house, if we have someone over and serve salad,"would you like balsamic vinaigrette or balsamic vinaigrette?" I sometimes laughingly say that we could hand out bottles as party favors at one of the kids parties, just what every preschooler always wants, a bottle of salad dressing. But I don't mean it, I could never just give them away to someone who might not appreciate them fully. I mean, good Lord, what if we had a chicken that needed to be drizzled? Yes, I have a squeeze bottle for that exact purpose.

So there it is, my craziness, out there for everyone to see and judge.

I really do feel better ;)